Monday 4 February 2013

How Revenue Performance Management (RPM) helps clients grow revenue


More and more companies are becoming troubled by their inability to drive consistent, predictable and sustainable revenue.  Up until the 2008 CEO’s wanted double-digit revenue growth.  During the financial crisis most were happy if they were able to simply hold the line, or at least not go backwards to quickly.  Now the quest is on again for that sustainable top line growth which has eluded so many for so long.  Regardless of whether their stance is offensive or defensive, the underlying challenges for CEO’s remain consistency, predictability and sustainability.

The first step is to understand the reasons why an organization’s revenue performance is no longer what it was, or what they would like or expect it to be.  Producing revenue isn’t a simple thing to do – not sustainably.  In the Business-To-Business (“B2B”) space, sales generally mark the end of a lengthy, complicated and highly interdependent chain of events which started with a strategic decision to focus on a particular market segment and culminated many months or even years later with a customer paying money in return for a product or service.  All the things that have to happen in between the beginning and the end or that process constitute one of the most important, and yet least understood and poorly managed business processes in companies today.

 Because that end-to-end process is so poorly understood, even by those managers directly responsible for it, when it stops working and sales slow very few people actually know why.  Some companies perform manifestly better than others – even through financial crises.  Even now, some are doing well in industries where their competitors are struggling or even going backwards.  So there’s clearly more to it than just the state of the economy or industry conditions.

Not knowing why something has stopped working as it should makes the CEO’s task of applying the right “fix” pretty difficult.  When many CEO’s and their Sales Directors find their revenues slowing or stopping, they don’t know why and they therefore don’t know what they should do to remedy the situation.  The old “tricks” that used to work when times were good – like buying another company, investing in a new CRM system, training or replacing the sales force, hiring a new Director of Sales or re-branding the company – don’t seem to work anymore.  To fix what’s broken now they have to stop guessing what might be wrong and understand which pieces of the process are broken and fix them.

And that’s what RPM does.  Analyse and fix broken revenue processes.


Baker Tilly UK has recently launched the Revenue Performance Management group (RPM).  Formed to help organisations manage their revenue (sales) risks and grow their top lines consistently and profitably.

In the seven years since it was launched in Australia, the Revenue Performance Management (“RPM”) Group has helped more than 70 organisations across a diverse range of industries including manufacturing, telecommunications, information technology, professional services, health care, media and entertainment improve their top line performance by an average of 23%.  .

The philosophy behind our RPM model is that successful and sustainable revenue generation needs to be a function of rigorous, consistent, repeatable and measureable business processes; business processes which are synchronised with the buying journey of the customer.

Our RPM team provides a range of diagnostic, planning and execution tools and services to help organisations understand why they aren't selling as much as they would like to, address immediate problems in their revenue creation processes, and transform those processes into sustainable, high-performance revenue-generating engines.